MATE Desktop 1.2 Released

[drag]

I often have problems with the little things. In gnome2 panel, why would the applets not be "pushed" to the right and to the left when changing to a bigger resolution? In KDE so far I don't have many of those details that bother me.

But programs from the KDE core or from the KDE "ecosystem" are still the most unstable I see around here. kmix segfaults often when adding or removing pulseaudio network sinks. akregator sometimes segfaults for no reason. In KDE 4.8.2 when I enable nepomuk/virtuoso kdeinit4 will crash as soon as I start krunner. I have recently again tried to use Kmail. It doesn't send emails, just disables every single widget on the screen and then sits there until I kill it.

Too many KDE related applications, not enaugh developers.

And yet another KDE related project: calligra 2.4... I have segfaulted calligrasheets and calligrastage both with simply dragging a spreadsheet "shape" in the working area. Could not reproduce it later. But calligrastage will consistently segfault when I enable the "presenter view", start a presentation and click on the left slide in the presenter view.

I recently "discovered" kontact. Nice gui for several things. But the ktimetracker thing there just doesn't work.

Also recently I decided to finally "fix" my old akonadi. It was slow, had undeletable mail accounts, and sometimes just segfaulted for no reason. akonadiconsole showed in the log that the mysql schemas were not really consistent with the new akonadi versions so I simply deleted the whole akonadi stuff from ~/.config/akonadi and recreated all configuraions. Turns out it doesn't store everything there, some mail filters went amok and only stopped wasting 100% cpu when I deleted the remaining agents in akonadiconsole. It kind of works now but my feeling that the whole thing is way too complicated to work well for everyone has been reinforced.

Plasma has stopped regularily segfaulting for me not before KDE 4.6. It then segfaulted until 4.7 I believe when trying to use the grid workspace layout but even that is stable now.

I have nothing against KDE per se. But everything in the KDE "ecosystem" seems to need a looong time to get somewhat stable.

If shit is just randomly segfaulting like that for you I'd say that you better check the memory on your system. Try memtest86+ and leave it running over night.

intermittent failure of tests (say passes 9 times out of 10) that is definitely a sign of bad ram.
constant and widespread failures means that you are lucky as it's just likely a misconfiguration. Ram is overclocked or something stupid like that.

[drag]

I use GNOME 3 but with gnome-panel instead of gnome-shell.
Then I get a desktop environment that resemble that of GNOME 2 but with the benefits of GNOME 3 and Gtk 3.

You should probably just use Gnome 3 with Gnome-shell and then install the extensions to enable to functionality that you want.

it's not difficult to make gnome-shell resemble gnome 2's panel if that is what you really want.

[schmidtbag]

@Kivada
Yeah, I see what you mean. You seem to be a little more angry about it than necessary but you do have a point. But, not all KDE programs have terrible names. Things like Konqueror, Amarok, or Nepomuk are ok to me though. Also, LibreOffice is pretty unoriginal as a name. It works, its professional sounding, and descriptive, but its pretty boring. OpenOffice at least had a little bit of a ring to it.

@ChrisXY
Thanks for the input. I personally don't get almost any of those issues, but I do have a very different setup. I would have to agree with many KDE programs are very incomplete, and I'd say in terms of the KDE software suite, what bothers me most about it is how there's nearly 2 of everything. If they just stuck with 1, then maybe it'd be easier to maintain and they wouldn't have to struggle with coming up with stupid names that start with K.

The most glitchy part that happens to my KDE setup is every once in a while when I boot up, it doesn't complete the login tasks. So I use a keyboard shortcut and nothing happens, or I double click to run a program and it doesn't start. Then 1 minute later I get a bunch of errors. The confusing thing is this is inconsistent. As another inconsistent issue, sometimes I go to shut down and it just doesn't. Even if I press the power button, nothing happens. If I want to properly shut down I need to open a terminal and sudo halt.


@Hamish Wilson
I agree, but what really just pisses me off about XFCE is it claims to be something its not. If it didn't advertise itself as being fast and lightweight then I wouldn't care. I still wouldn't prefer it but I wouldn't complain about it either.

[Mystro256]

You should probably just use Gnome 3 with Gnome-shell and then install the extensions to enable to functionality that you want.

it's not difficult to make gnome-shell resemble gnome 2's panel if that is what you really want.

Another alternative would be Cinnamon, since the purposed goal is to take Gnome Shell and make it more gnome 2 like. It's not perfect but has a lot of promise and customization.

[Kivada]

@Kivada
Yeah, I see what you mean. You seem to be a little more angry about it than necessary but you do have a point.

I'm not mad at any one particular thing, I just hate the entire trend in the industry toward terrible interfaces and shitty designs. Just because Apple and Microsoft are doing it doesn't mean it's the right direction.

You don't make the technical easy enough for the absolute dumbest people, you raise the standard of education so that you don't have to dumb things down.

[Kivada]

Another alternative would be Cinnamon, since the purposed goal is to take Gnome Shell and make it more gnome 2 like. It's not perfect but has a lot of promise and customization.

It does, but its still heavier then Mate/Gnome2.

[dungeon]

I used Gnome 2 around 6 years, then they start with Gnome 3 and that did not work with my graphic card. Then i searched for replace and tried kde, xfce, lxde and finally calmed my soul to openbox . OMG wms are better then anything, i just load what i want, one panel, onw wallpaper, few services, choose apps what i need... and everything just works.

And now, no one can turned me back to so called "traditional" or "modern" DE, because DEs are all bloated designer's creatures. And that is
not for me, not anymore.

[V!NCENT]

I like KDE and XFCE. KDE is the ultimate GUI experience where XFCE is like an extremely lightweight tool to provide the most basic GUI with advanced features that Gnome simply lacks. I do notice it being a shitload faster, even on my year old laptop. Realy.

So KDE for my desktop and XFCE for my cloud server.

Now that Gnome 2 is forked into Mate and there's already stuff in it I like, as opposed to the original Gnome 2, I think it might become a good desktop with all the original Gnome developpers being replaced with fresh ones. No more usability terror, while keeping it a simple desktop.

If the devs would slowly port things over, step-by-step, to Gtk3 and sowly start implementing stuff like SVG all over the place with more flexibility; it could become a great alternative to KDE that I don't have to hate.

[V!NCENT]

From the MATE wiki:

The truth is that many GNOME3 applications that have been ported to Gtk3 have lost compatibility with Gtk2. They have been modified to be 'easy to use' and to have a 'cleaner interface', but also oversimplifying them. This severely limits the intermediate and advanced users, and also users accustomed to GNOME2 and the applications that go along with GNOME2.

These guys don't have the usability terror mindset ^^,

[Adarion]

OMG. There is a news about a new release of MATE which is by itself nice and interesting. Fine project that keeps the Gnome2 spirit alive (as trinity does with KDE3) for people who do not want to use (yet) the recent versions of either DE for whatever reason. Okay, fine.

But here in the forums there is flaming about KDE and XFCE to read. Hello? Some people probably ate the wrong Müsli/Cornflakes for breakfast?
I have Gnome2 still on my machine that is just for typing in the labs and it does the job, and at home I enjoy KDE 4.8.2 and twm (ok, latter is hard to "enjoy" but I was too lazy for anything else on that machine). And I have some elderly WindowsDEs and if you kick them around for 5h after installation to remove the nonsense then they are fairly ok, too.
I also once used XFCE but had to leave that since at that time thunar constantly crashed when having open document files in the directory. I'd give it a try again as soon as I have more spare time.
Nothing was ever perfect (neither Gnome nor KDE nor XFCE or any other DE/WM) but I don't understand that dirt-throwing in all directions here. I also don't see a problem with the K-naming scheme. A lot of other project also have similar schemes.

I'll check out mate when it is in the Gentoo tree. Atm there is still Gnome2 and in ~arch there is Gnome3.